Development of Blast Event Simulation

The design of Army vehicles to resist blast from a mines or from explosive devices is of great interest in order to provide protection to the vehicle and its occupants. Full size mine blast tests are expensive and time consuming. Using a numerical simulation for predicting the interaction of the mine blast with the vehicle can minimize the testing, and identify design changes for increased survivability. A seamless blast event simulation system will be developed and validated. The DoD CTH hydrocode will be used for modeling the explosion and it will be coupled with commercial codes such as ABAQUS, LS-Dyna, and/or MADYMO for computing the structural response induced by the explosion. MADYMO will be used for assessing the occupants' safety due to the blast. The blast event simulation system will be able to update the numerical models for improved correlation to test data and it will evaluate a confidence level to the computations. The CTH code will be validated for simulating landmine detonations through comparison to a comprehensive set of mine detonation experiments reported in [21]. The blast event simulation system will be validated by analyzing the experiment presented in [22] for metallic targets subjected to landmine explosions.